The exhibition titled “Together. The New Architecture of the Collective” at the Vitra Design Museum will be running until 10 September for visitors to take a closer look at the issue of housing, increasingly oriented towards collective living solutions.

When you click on architecture sites or flick through the magazines that focus on architecture you come across terms like co-housing, multi-generational houses that describe new forms of living as a reaction to a rapidly changing world. The change is both structural and social because housing is becoming scarce in cities that are growing out of all proportion and driving property prices up prohibitively, because of the economic crisis and because of new forms of shared living.
In this sense, “Together. The New Architecture of the Collective” at the Vitra Design Museum is the first exhibition to explore the issue of collective building and living, also offering spatial experiences. Models, videos and housing on a scale of 1:1 are used to showcase examples from Europe, Asia and the US in an exhibition that starts from the history of “social housing” as a response to problems across different eras, from Charles Fourier in France to Monte Verità in Ticino (Switzerland) to the protest and hippy movements of the 1960s-80s, touting the slogan “Make love, not lofts”.
This is followed by an installation of 21 collective housing models, including Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Zurich, which show how new ways of living bring with them new approaches to design. The third section of the exhibition curated by Ilka and Andreas Ruby with EM2N gives visitors the possibility of entering a “cluster house” on a scale of 1:1, with communal areas and private rooms.
“Together. The New Architecture of the Collective” is a must-visit opportunity to find out much more about this silent revolution that has been happening for years.
At the building level, the “sharing economy” is also driving change at the social level, in response to an increasingly heterogeneous society in search of new forms of shared living beyond the traditional family homes. All the aspects of the exhibition are explored in guided tours and a packed collateral programme of conferences and meetings, as well as a catalogue with critical essays by Andreas Hofer, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Anna Puigjaner, Robert Temel, Yuma Shinohara

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